By Prairie Miller

A sort of but not quite same-sex beauty and the beast, The Hottie And The Nottie takes itself far too seriously by enlightening a presumably clueless audience about a major sticky situation when it comes to matters of the heart. According to a particular law of physics possibly existing only inside Hilton's head, standing deliberately beside every gorgeous and irresistible babe is a total female dog. That's the Nottie, a best friend whose purpose in life is to ward off any panting guys in pursuit in the vicinity. But since the designated hottie in this tedious tall tale happens to be Paris Hilton, she couldn't be talking about anything real, considering that her own bad girl posse includes the likes of Lindsay and Britney, two hotties in their own right not likely to agree with any of this nonsense.

Paris definitely wear the pants in this ho hum extra-lite romantic comedy, and I think I can pretty accurately report that she keeps them on underneath, from beginning to end. Paris does ditzy and discouraged dumb blonde Cristabel in Hottie And The Nottie, a born beautiful LA man-magnet suffering from an overload of male attention. Geeky Nate (Joel Moore) is a luckless-in-love loser who's been longing for Cristabel since grade school.

After a string of dead end romances, Nate returns to town two decades later to pursue her, only to find that the same ugly duckling Nottie June (Christine Lakin) who tagged along after Cristabel back then, is still protecting her pal from unwanted overtures - like for instance an army of stalkers tailing her, just for the long shot of maybe sneaking a sniff of her passing flesh on the sly. And ward them away she does, whether with bossy behavior or the horror of a guy having to take in an eyeful of June's acne, rotting teeth, hairy bod and furry toes, just to get next to Cristabel. In other words, not happening any time soon.

Paris shamelessly plays pretty much herself throughout this vanity parade passing itself off as a movie. Though at one point she humbles herself a little to show that she's just like the rest of us regular people, by playing coy with a fart cushion. And in a party scene where she seems to be wandering in from another movie out there called 27 dresses, Paris plays hard to get by showing up in a wedding gown, go figure.

Curiously enough, with all the voluntary and involuntary celibacy going on with these two weirdo girlfriends, there's definitely more than a hint of homo-erotic desires between Cristabel and June. But you know in any case that this movie is badly in need of an actual script, when Paris, seemingly to impress her Nottie, triumphantly blurts out her biggest line of the entire production to a hunk hitting on her in the local pub: "Pay our bar tab, bitch." A decisive take charge moment for the "it" girl.